Matzpen: A History of Israeli Dissidence

472 Pages·2020·6.617 MB·English

by  Lutz Fiedler

MATZPEN
A History of Israeli Dissidence
Lutz Fiedler
Translated by Jake Schneider
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Original version © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, 2017
English translation © Jake Schneider, 2020
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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printed and bound in Great Britain
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ISBN 978 1 4744 5116 1 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 5118 5 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 5119 2 (epub)
Th e right of Lutz Fiedler to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Originally published in German as Matzpen. Eine andere israelische Geschichte
(Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017)
Th e translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation
Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative
of the Fritz Th yssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Offi ce, the collecting society
VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers &
Booksellers Association).
Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.
Contents
List of Figures v
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Cohn-Bendit on the Roof in Gan Shmuel 1
1 Communist Dissidents 29
De-Stalinisation in Israel 29
Revolt Against the Histadrut 43
Shalom, Shalom ve-Eyn Shalom – Peace, Peace, When Th ere is No Peace 54
2 Th e Israel–Palestine Question 78
‘Al-Ard and Us’: In Support of Israeli Arabs’ Protest 78
Traditions of Dissent: Bygone Utopias of Jewish–Arab Coexistence 86
From the Algerian War to the Palestine Question 102
‘Foreign Natives’: Prospects of Recognition 114
3 Th e Invention of a Hebrew Nation 139
‘One Day, Two Declarations’ 139
‘. . . and the Canaanite Was Th en In the Land’ 150
Profaning the Language: Th e Emergence of Israeli Hebrew 161
Hebrew Pornography 172
From Hebrew Nation to Semitic Action 180
After 1967: Hostilities and Contradictions 188
iv | matzpen
4 Hal’a HaKibush! – Down with the Occupation 213
Th e Six-Day War and the Return of the Palestine Question 213
Parting Ways: Utopias in Confl ict 226
Border-Crossings: From Gan Shmuel to Damascus 240
State or Revolution 251
5 Khamsin: A New Vision for the Middle East 281
London–Paris–Beirut 281
Eli Lobel: ‘A Foreign Minister without a State’ 287
Arab Self-Criticism and Palestinian Revolution 297
Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle East 306
6 Beyond the Holocaust: Jewish Past, Hebrew Present,
Socialist Future 325
Cohn-Bendit’s Departure: Israel and the Holocaust 325
Jewish and Hebrew Memories Juxtaposed 336
Socialism or Barbarism 352
Lebanon 1982: ‘Th e Real War and the Imaginary War’ 366
Bibliography 405
Index of Persons 455
Figures
I.1 A group photo of the revolution 5
1.1 Cover of the fi rst issue of Matzpen, 21 November 1962 31
1.2 Akiva Orr as a seaman, early 1950s 45
1.3 Oded Pilavsky in the early 1960s 52
2.1 Moshé Machover and Jabra Nicola 102
3.1 Advertisement in Haaretz, 22 September 1967 144
3.2 Dan Omer outside his protest tent in Jerusalem, 1966 179
3.3 Uri Avnery and Haim Hanegbi, shortly after the war of
June 1967 191
3.4 Th e Hebrew writer Shimon Tzabar during his London
period, 1974 195
4.1 Michel Warschawski and Sylvia Klingberg at a demonstration
in Tel Aviv 219
4.2 Haim Hanegbi and Ilan Halevi on the campus of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Givat Ram, 1969 236
4.3 Th e defendants in the courtroom, Haifa, 1973 249
5.1 Cover image of the fi rst issue of Khamsin 283
5.2 Eli Lobel in the 1960s 291
6.1 Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Dan Ben-Amotz at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, 1970 326
vi | matzpen
Th e author would like to thank Meir Wigoder, Haim Hanegbi, Jonathan
Lobel, Sharon Orr, Dan Hadani, Ehud Ein-Gil, Moshé Machover and Amos
Ben-Shachar for granting permission to reprint their photographs.
Figs I.1 and 3.3: © Private collection of Haim Hanegbi
Figs 1.1 and 5.1: © Lutz Fiedler
Fig. 1.2: © Estate of Akiva Orr (held by Sharon Orr)
Fig. 1.3: © Estate of Oded Pilavsky/www.matzpen.org
Fig. 2.1: © Private collection of Moshé Machover
Fig. 3.1: © Haim Hanegbi, Shimon Tzabar
Fig. 3.2: © Amos Ben-Shachar
Figs 3.4, 4.1, 4.2 and 6.1: © Photographs by Meir Wigoder
Fig. 4.3: © From the collection of the National Library of Israel, courtesy of
Oscar Tauber (Dan Hadani collection)
Fig. 5.2: © Private collection of Jonathan Lobel
Acknowledgements
Th is book is a translated and updated version of a German-language book
that was originally published with Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in 2017.
Its publication was preceded by a long personal journey, and the book has
multiple origin stories. One of them began in December 2004 with a screen-
ing at a Jerusalem cultural centre. Th e fi lm was the documentary Matzpen:
Anti-Zionist Israelis, whose director Eran Torbiner hoped to save the story of
these Israeli leftists from oblivion. Th e fi lm resonated with earlier conversa-
tions in which Dan Diner had called my attention to Matzpen and pointed
out that the group had yet to be historically interpreted in the context of
Jewish and Israeli history. His suggestions began to prompt questions of my
own. It is thanks to him, my academic teacher and doctoral supervisor, that
this initial mixture of political curiosity and intellectual fascination was trans-
lated into a scholarly interest and then developed into a dissertation project.
For his intellectual guidance, for his help with this project’s conception and
implementation and for his personal trust, I owe him a permanent debt of
gratitude.
Th e work on this monograph had its institutional home at the Simon
Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University in
Germany directed then by Dan Diner. I am particularly grateful to him and
to his former deputy, Susanne Zepp, for the support and the opportunity
to participate in an exciting intellectual environment. My appreciation also
goes to my former colleagues, who contributed to this book’s completion
vii
viii | matzpen
with their support, friendship and openness to dialogue, in particular
Nicolas Berg, Hans-Joachim Hahn and Omar Kamil, as well as Mohammed
Ahmed, Judith Ciminski, Arndt Engelhardt, Mandy Fitzpatrick, Walid Abd
El Gawad, Jan Gerber, Natasha Gordinsky, Philipp Graf, Marion Hammer,
Yaron Jean, David Jünger, Klaus Kempter, Carolin Kosuch, David Kowal-
ski, Ulrike Kramme, Felix Pankonin, Nicole Petermann, Anna Pollmann,
Regina Randhofer, Carina Roell, Grit Scheff er, Momme Schwarz, Alexandra
Tyrolf, Sebastian Voigt and Robert Zwarg. My conversations with Haim
Be’er (Ramat Gan), Yaakov Ariel (Chapel Hill) and Sadik J. Al-Azm (Berlin)
led me to ask new questions about my subject.
I owe special thanks to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
for funding a one-year research stay at the Koebner Minerva Center for German
History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In addition to intensive research,
I had the opportunity to conduct numerous interviews with Matzpen mem-
bers and others whose willingness to share information was indispensable to this
project. Among them were Uri Avnery, Ehud and Aviva Ein-Gil, Ilan Halevi,
Haim Hanegbi, Oded Pilavsky, Udi Adiv and Khalil Toama. I am extremely
grateful for their support and commitment to my project. In London, Moshé
Machover opened up his private archive to me. I warmly thank him and Michael
Warschawski, Leila Kadi, Kristin Couper-Lobel, Gabriel Lachmann, Ruth and
Klaus Rürup, Menachem Carmi and Alexander Flores, who shared their vast
knowledge, as well as important personal documents, with me.
Without the support of friends and family in Leipzig, Berlin and Jerusalem,
the often-challenging work on this book would not have been possible. For this,
I thank my parents Monika and Wolfram, my brothers Falk and Jörg, as well
as my father-in-law Andreas Gallas, who sadly did not live to see the realisation
of the English publication. I also thank my friends for their solidarity, encour-
agement and patience, specifi cally Friederike Ankele, Netanel Anor, Irene
Aue-Ben-David, Martin Eichler, Hannes Giessler-Furlan, Gero and Michael
Götschenberg, Corry Guttstadt, Negar Habibi, Carsten Ilius, Grit Jilek, Laura
Jockusch and Omer Off en, all the Lindstrots, Irit Lourie, Katrin Reimer-
Gordinskaya and Jenny Tillmanns. No one accompanied the evolution of this
book – the German original and the English translation – more extensively
than Elisabeth Gallas. As my partner and closest confi dant, she shared in my
enthusiasm and sustained me in the face of a laborious abyss. For her company
acknowledgements | ix
and stamina during the process of putting together this book, I am more
indebted to her than I can express in these few short lines.
It gives me great pleasure and fi lls me with gratitude that the book is now
available in English, and I owe a great deal of thanks to the many people who
have made this publication possible. First and foremost, I would like to thank
Edinburgh University Press for including the book in their programme. Nicola
Ramsey, Adela Rauchova, Emma Rees and Kirsty Woods have carefully guided
the development of this English-language publication from the very beginning.
Th e translation of the German-language book was generously funded by
the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, the Fritz Th yssen Stiftung,
VG Wort and the Federal Foreign Offi ce, who awarded the book with the
‘Geisteswissenschaften International’ prize and enabled me to take on the chal-
lenge of returning to and revising it. I am very thankful for this opportunity.
I could not have found anyone better than Jake Schneider, who without
hesitation was ready to embark on the adventure of translating this book.
He did a tremendous job in transforming the German version of this book
into English, demonstrated sensitivity for the topic, was always patient and
sympathetic regarding all my enquiries and has done more than anyone else
to ensure that the book found the right tone. I also owe a lot of thanks
to Elizabeth Welsh, who patiently took over the copy-editing and gave the
book its fi nal touches. Ella Shechter has checked all my translations from the
Hebrew with patience and accuracy, and I am most grateful to her. Tizian
Raschpichler was so kind to assist with the compilation of the index.
My warm thanks also go to Petra Gamke-Breitschopf, head of the edito-
rial department at Dubnow-Institute, who aided me tirelessly in turning the
German manuscript into a book and was extremely helpful in ensuring that
there would be an English-language translation.
When the book was published in German, Hannes Giessler-Furlan,
Andrea Kirchner and Jan-Eike Dunkhase provided vital assistance with their
readings and critical comments. For the English version, I relied on the
support of my friends Kobi Kabalek (State College), Yaakov Ariel (Chapel
Hill), Debby Farber (Be’er-Sheva/Berlin) and Adi Gordon (Amherst), whose
critical readings and comments on some chapters on some chapters were of
tremendous help. I dearly thank them all. For all remaining mistakes, I alone
bear responsibility.
x | matzpen
Finally, I wish to thank my colleagues and friends from the Selma Stern
Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg and at the Department of
Cultural History and Th eory at Humboldt University Berlin, in particular
Liliana R. Feierstein, in the framework of which I was able to prepare this
version of the book for publication.
More than a year before I completed the work on my dissertation
from which this book resulted, I received word of the death of Akiva Orr
(1931–2013). For many years, he had allowed me deep insights into his
own life story and the story of Matzpen. His life was guided by his faith
in historical progress: hope that humans would take fate into their own
hands and coalesce into a united humanity. Th is book is dedicated to his
memory.
Lutz Fiedler
Berlin, Summer 2020